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Featured in Development

Alex Bradbury gives an overview of the status and development of RISC-V as it relates to modern operating systems, highlighting major research strands, controversies, and opportunities to get involved.

Featured in Architecture & Design

Will Jones talks about how Habito, the leading digital mortgage broker, benefited from using Haskell, some of the wins and trade-offs that have brought it to where it is today and where it's going next. He also talks about why functional programming is beneficial for large projects, and how it helps especially with migrating the data store.

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Katharine Jarmul discusses research related to fair-and-private ML algorithms and privacy-preserving models, showing that caring about privacy can help ensure a better model overall and support ethics.

Featured in Culture & Methods

This personal experience report shows that political in-house games and bad corporate culture are not only annoying and a waste of time, but also harm a lot of initiatives for improvement. Whenever we become aware of the blame game, we should address it! DevOps wants to deliver high quality. The willingness to make things better - products, processes, collaboration, and more - is vital.

Featured in DevOps

Service mesh architectures enable a control and observability loop. At the moment, service mesh implementations vary in regard to API and technology, and this shows no signs of slowing down. Building on top of volatile APIs can be hazardous. Here we suggest to use a simplified, workflow-friendly API to shield organization platform code from specific service-mesh implementation details.

InfoQ: Do you have any concerns that LightTable might become diluted or bogged down by an excess of plugins?

Chris: In general I think ecosystems are pretty good at regulating themselves - there are many thousands of plugins for emacs/vim/sublime/textmate and they all seem to do ok. We are a bit different in that you have even more freedom to change things (you could rip out everything we've done and replace it), but I think the community will do a good job of using what works and ignoring what doesn't.

One thing we did want to do better though is handling the need to have a ton of plugins to get a reasonable environment. Stock Emacs or Vim, for example, are pretty awful and there's no good mechanism for getting a pack of plugins that provides an experience for x. LT's plugin system allows for plugins to depend on other plugins, which means we can create curated "distributions" if you will. They end up just being plugins that rely on lots of others and provide a bit of configuration so that all the behaviors work nicely together.

This also happens to a place that the BOT architecture shines. It's very easy for an end user to remove conflicting behaviors and make any random set of plugins play nicely without ever having to touch any code. So the short answer is no, but we've also planned ahead to ease some of the downside of the plugins-for-everything strategy.

InfoQ: In the initial Kickstarter plan the planned open sourcing of the project was described as “At some level, this is an experiment in how open source and business can mix - it will be educational for us all.” How are the two mixing so far? Are we going to see paid plugins or advanced core features unlocked by a paid license?

This has been something we've been trying to figure out for awhile. While there are a number of strategies that can turn LT itself into a business, we've discovered something else along the way that fits a little more naturally. Instead of monetizing Light Table directly, we have decided to build services that hook into it. We'll use those as fuel for the company.

We're not quite ready to talk about exactly what those services are yet, but I will say that it revolves around a dramatic change in the way we think about programming. A good way of thinking about it is that Light Table is our platform for delivering on the mission we set out on from the beginning; empowering people to solve problems and build the world around them.

What we have released recently is our first step in that direction, but believe me when I say that what you see now is a small blip compared to what's coming in the near future.